“Battle Cry”

Jack White’s first new song in nearly three years, “Battle Cry,” is essentially a commercial jingle, which might seem odd if the commercial weren’t for his own company Warstic. White co-owns the company, which manufactures baseball bats, with Detroit Tigers second baseman Ian Kinsler, and the pair star in their own ad soundtracked by the song. Kinsler essentially plays himself, while White takes the role of a trickster god called the Raven, who tries to psyche out the athlete during an at-bat.

“Battle Cry” itself functions as a warm up song with two elements. There’s a bombardment of vertiginous guitar riffs, thundering drums, and ballpark handclaps; it may be White’s heaviest, crunchiest jamming since Icky Thump. Then there are also problematic, ostensibly tribal chants that bookend the song. Those aside, the power of “Battle Cry” makes it a song not to hear through headphones; you should cue it before you go up to bat, in a stadium with tens of thousands of roaring fans, in the ninth inning of a tie game.